Sourdough Hokkaido Milk Bread with Tangzhong

Good catch! You’re right.

I must’ve been doing the math for 1 cup of water 90/236…which is closer to 40% than 33.333% but that is neither here nor there.

90/135ish in a cup of flour = .66666

You want 2/3 cup of flour.

(I’ll fix the recipe.)

Thank you so much!

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I recently made this Hokkaido Milk Bread again but with a lot more starter due to inventory and time constraints. It worked out quite well, so I wanted to share this variation on the recipe. I was working off the cuff rather than doing hydration math, which you may have noticed I enjoy. I also enjoy “hmm, let me add less milk to compensate for the extra wet starter…hmm, the dough is still wet, let me add more flour.”

As a result the final dough weight is ~1766g vs the original recipe ~1541g. I used bigger loaf pans. I think I could have gotten away with tall bread in regular loaf pans, but I can’t promise this since I didn’t try it.

Method is the same, minus the original special starter built. I also didn’t cool the melted butter and tangzhong, but rather mixed them with the cool milk and eggs. Therefore, the resulting dough was warm, in the 80s F. This combined with the large amount of starter made possible a bulk fermentation that was only 2.5 hours (in a lit oven). Shaping took about 20 minutes, and the final proof was about 3 hours at room temperature.

390g 100% hydration starter (hypothesis regarding the nice Maillard: I did extra feeding of my starter. I grew it to max straight from the refrigerator, then fed it and grew it to max again.)
200g tangzhong (170g milk + 30g bread flour)
650g flour (400g bread flour +250g all purpose)
100g sugar
12g salt
200g milk
2 eggs
114g (1 stick) melted unsalted butter






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Hello, I tried this recipe for the first time. From the sound of the reviews I expected the bread the be very soft in texture, like dinner rolls or buns. I followed the recipe exactly, w/o improvising. My bread, while delicious, was very firm. I had a beautiful spring in the oven with nice tall loaves. The crumb was just harder and denser than what I was expecting.

I’m sorry your bread was on the firm side. I do find this sourdough version to be somewhat less fluffy than when I make it with yeast. I’m not sure what might have made it hard and dense, though. Perhaps underproofing or less liquid in the form of super small eggs? I’m grasping at straws on that last idea lol

If you’re game to try it again, maybe take the bulk or final proof farther, or try this verson I did later on when I had a lot of starter on hand

Good luck!

I’ll give that a try, thanks.

Hi, I’d like to try this for “savoury” sandwiches (as opposed to sweet), like with ham, cheese etc, and I’m thinking maybe it’s too sweet. Would it be safe to reduce the amount of sugar in the dough (how much would you suggest?) without modifying the sweet starter, or do you think other changes to the recipe would be required? Does the sugar play a role in the fluffiness and texture? Thanks in advance!

I used to original recipe as hamburger buns and didn’t find it too sweet, but later I tried not using a sweet stiff starter because i happened to have so much regular starter to use up, and I had good results…less sugar in that dough because the starter was just flour and water. You might give that formula a go:

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Is a standard loaf pan 8" or 9" long?

The small or medium of these would work (8.5 and 9)

As you can see in the recipe photos, I used a pyrex loaf pan – not ideal because of slanted slices – which is 7" long at its base but wider on top. I now have the medium USA pan.

So I’ve made this bread several times with great success. This last time I got adventurous and used whole wheat in the starter and also 200 g whole wheat in the main dough. I also added raisins. The bread came out great, a little darker than the white flour loaves, but I had a huge blowout on one side of the bread, which hadn’t happened before. Any ideas why this happened?

That sounds like a delicious bunch of changes to the recipe.

The burst side situation – could be proofing or less likely, oven temp higher than usual. Underproofing can cause the dough to still have enough oomph to burst in the oven.

Of course this is one of those sweet spot things where if you go too far in the other direction, it kind of deflates instead.

Hmm, I don’t think it was underproofed. This seems to be a very slow bread. The final proof spent a night in the cold garage, and almost all day in the kitchen. It just rises extremely slow for me. If I try this version again I think I’ll lower the temperature a bit. It tastes delicious! Great recipe!

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It’s funny and true.

Two loaves just out of the oven - they smell wonderful. Not so great in the looks department - too much pan/not enough dough. This was a purely technical issue; I should have realized that 730-ish g of dough isn’t enough, by about 25%, for a 9x5 loaf tin, but I so rarely bake in tins that it didn’t occur to me until I saw that my fully risen dough sections didn’t even come close to touching each other. Oven spring did some of the job but there’s little height for a sandwich loaf. So my bad - but could I humbly request that the “standard” loaf pans specified in the recipe are called out by size?

Hi Melissa, I just came across this recipe from a while back and it sure looks great!

I was wondering how you might incorporate further richness, sweetness and body into this through the addition of condensed milk?

My boss at the bakery is wanting a sweet and very very light milk bun to become the foundation for a fish burger.

Let me know what you think,

Many thanks

Jack

Forgetting the size thing for the moment - I was out of bread flour so, rather than going out to the store, I milled 450g of Yecora Rojo and bolted/sifted it down - yield was about 360g of fine flour with maybe some germ still in but not bran to speak of. I picked Yecora Rojo b/c it’s billed as being 13.5% protein and the recipe called for bread flour. I used it straight up for the starter, and bulked it up with KA AP for the main dough, so final mix was about 60% YR and 40% KA AP. It seems to have worked well.

Because of the smallness of the loaves which kept the three sections from really fusing into one (see my previous comment) I decided to treat each loaf as 3 mini-loaves. you can see one sliced in the third photo, where you can also see the reddish cast to the crumb from the Yecora Rojo flour.

Final thoughts - Thanks, @Fermentada; this a well-specified recipe for a delicious bread. Next time, though, I will scale up by 20-25%. I’m also thinking about modifying the recipe a bit, subbing out the milk for water and the butter for a neutral oil (sunflower or canola), adding another egg, and making into challah (no dairy, so it can be pareve and eaten with a meat meal). I’ll let you know how that goes.

Sidewise_Hokkaido

9x5x2.75 should be okay, though a little roomier. The pyrex loaf pan I used has 1.5 qt capacity. Here’s a comparison of the same amount of water in both pans.

Just seeing your second post now. Those mini loaves look lovely! Scaling up also makes sense. Your crumb is open so the petiteness isn’t a case of underproofing. Good luck with the next bake … Hokkaido not-milk bread :slight_smile:

I’ve heard of using condensed milk but I don’t have a formula or experience using it in this bread. Rumor also has it that using commercial yeast will get you a little more fluff. If you find a recipe you like online, I’d love to hear about it.

I put this together last night by using your recipe as a base along with some other popular ones for the same bread on the internet. I havent tried it yet but just off to work to do so! Hopefully it goes well, will keep you posted…:blush:

Tangzhong - take to 65 degrees only!

170g milk
56g bread flour

Dough

400g bread flour
225g all purpose flour
40g skim milk powder
40g sugar
15g salt

Dough Wet Ingredients
200g sourdough starter (%100 hydration)
200gm poolish
160g condensed milk
100g milk
20g honey
2 eggs beaten
120g melted butter